Nature Notes: Good News and Bad
Try to look beyond the madding crowd. There’s a lot going on in the world of nature, all of it free of charge. North America’s tiniest hummingbird, the calliope from the Pacific Northwest, has come to nectar alongside a ruby-throated male at Joanne Dittmar’s house in Springs on the bay just west of Hog Creek. Sibley defines it as an “accidental.” The ruby-throat is our tiniest bird species; just imagine how hard it would be to see a bird two-thirds its size with the naked eye as it whizzed by.
The milkweeds, both common and orange, are coming into full bloom. Keep your eyes open for monarch butterflies. We hope they’ll be mating, then depositing their eggs on the milkweeds soon. The eggs hatch, the larvae feed on the milkweeds’ poisonous sap and thereby gain immunity from predation by birds and other animals.
Box turtles have been moving to and fro for egg laying and other domestic duties since the middle of June. Chris Chapin, a local realtor and naturalist, picked three off three different local roads so they wouldn’t be run over. On June 9, I found a large one that didn’t have such a savior freshly squashed into the pavement on Brick Kiln Road in Bridgehampton. Arrgh.
Joanne Dittmar has a big box turtle moving around on her property. She lives on a dead-end street so the turtle has more than a sporting chance to live to 100, which is not unusual for turtles and tortoises that are not run over or otherwise come to an untimely demise.
The ospreys that nest on the Noyac side of Long Beach and a pair that occupies a nest just north of the North Haven bridge are doing well with one exception. An adult osprey was run over and flattened on Short Beach Road on North Haven on Friday. Its nest is liable to fail, as it takes two adults to raise chicks to fledging and keep them alive for a few weeks thereafter.
Some osprey pairs mate for life and for good reason. However, the two nesting on a platform at the edge of a pond near Hog Creek are a new pair, according to Joanne Dittmar, who watches them every year from her window. The previous female was quite finicky; this year’s is quietly resourceful.
Ospreys are one of the few bird species native throughout the world. Though decimated by the use of DDT and other insecticides once used to battle mosquitoes, they have climbed back and are doing well, particularly during the last few years, as the mobs of bunkers have returned to our waters. On the other hand, some nests are in the path of mosquito-control helicopters, while others are besieged by bald eagles, which are making a comeback on Long Island.
Whippoorwills may be doing a bit better in prime whippoorwill habitat. Two weeks ago, I heard three different males sounding off along Daniel’s Hole Road west of Route 114. I wonder if last year’s helicopter curfew encouraged them to try again, as there were only one or two at most off and on near the airport for several years prior to 2017. On the other hand, I didn’t hear any evening songs of hermit thrushes, which used to frequent that area of the South Fork’s pine barrens year in, year out.
Several “Nature Notes” ago I said there was no appreciable gypsy moth damage around. Apparently, I spoke too soon. Victoria Bustamante gave me an account of gypsy moth infestations on both sides of Route 114 north of Stephen Hand’s Path and running all the way to Daniel’s Hole Road. I checked on Friday; she was right.
Next year could be the big one for gypsy moths; the first such in these parts since at least 2002. Victoria also reported that serious gypsy moth infestations dotted the trees on both sides of the Long Island Expressway, but that some trees that had been stripped bare were leafing out again following the Friday downpours of two weeks ago.
This year could be a very big chigger year, despite what Cornell Cooperative Extension says about chiggers not existing on Long Island. Terry Sullivan ran into a slew of them on a property near his house. They were the red adults, which feed on vegetation, rather than humans, but the larvae that stem from them are voracious as far as we homo sapiens are concerned.
If you’re out hiking, you might have a hard time coming up with a black-legged (deer) tick or two, but don’t get too cocky, lone star ticks, the females of which have a white spot on their back, are all over and very hungry.
I’m predicting a big hurricane just as I did in April of 2012, the year that Superstorm Sandy hit at the end of October.
Whether President Trump and his cohorts believe in global warming or not, water levels are rising. A part of the Antarctic ice shelf as big as Delaware is about to break off, and the glaciers of Glacier National Park are disappearing at a rapid rate. Remember, as sea level rises, so does the freshwater aquifer that lies atop it. Freshwater is less dense than saltwater. A case in point: On Friday while moving from Industrial Road to Second House Road in Montauk, I went past Brushy Island in Fort Pond, which only 30 years ago was populated with trees and brush. In the early 1920s when Norman Taylor defined the flora of Montauk, the island was home to Montauk’s only basswood. All I could see the other day was a single tree stump sticking up. Brushy Island is no longer!
One last wonderful bit of news: The Town of Brookhaven also has an airport, Calabro Airport. In the June 26 Newsday there was a big public notice that there is a plan to install solar panels on the ground throughout much of its open areas. The East Hampton Airport has even more open ground than Calabro. How about it, sustainability committee?
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].